The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  The elder Thurston girl had a round face; she wasn’t overweight, a little gaunt if anything, but that seemed to be the way her bones went. Her sister was much prettier and she thought always would be, though still a child rather than a maiden.

  And they’re the sisters of a ruler, of course, so it won’t matter that much for them, Yseult thought. They’re both clever, which is more important.

  “Thank you,” Yseult said. “He was a gallant knight and a good man and a wonderful brother . . . except when he was being a jerk; you know how brothers are sometimes.”

  They both nodded, and she went on: “He saved our family after . . . well, after what my mother did.”

  “Like our brother Martin,” Shawonda said bitterly.

  Janie took her hand consolingly. “It’s good to see Fred again, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yes!”

  They passed a knot of men-at-arms drinking outside a tavern that had spilled out to encroach on the way with trestle tables; they ignored the girls, sitting with their arming doublets half unlaced and intent on the tail end of a song:“Now gracious God may save our King,

  His people all well-willing,

  Give his arms success at ending,

  That we with mirth may safely sing”

  And then the tune turned to a shout as fists pounded hard enough to make the tankards and baskets of bread jump:“Deo gratias, Montivalia!

  Redde pro victoria!”

  The castle gate was even more crowded than the town; they barely crept in along the chained-off pedestrian edge of the drawbridge, but the squire who commanded the guard knew her face.

  “My lady Liu,” he said, thumping fist to breastplate and bowing his head. Then he turned and called, “Make way for the Lady Liu and her guests! In the High Queen’s name!”

  Nobody recognized the Thurstons yet, and it was uncertain how they fit into the Table of Ranks anyway; Yseult had decided that they were princesses, but wasn’t going to insist on full state just now. The soldiers thumped the butts of their guisarmes as well, then used the shafts to open a lane for them, and Yseult nodded in reply. Another sign that she was being eased into her new status; and that she was shining in the light of Huon’s reflected glory. It was certainly more agreeable that being a pariah under suspicion, but . . .

  No, I must avoid bitterness. I have become cynical and reluctant to trust. My confessor is right; these are tasks I must work on. And these are nice girls who have suffered badly. My mother betrayed us, but at least she didn’t kill our father, as their brother did. Take up your cross, Yseult Liu.

  “It’s good of you to volunteer to work so soon after such a terrible journey,” she said, as they climbed the spiral staircase of the donjon tower. “Everyone is putting state aside and doing what they can.”

  Their mother and sister-in-law were off making appearances where they told the truth about what Martin Thurston did, which was why she’d been set to shepherd and chaperone the girls. It had already started producing results that the High Queen was pleased with. None of them were getting much rest; the girls were still moving a bit stiffly, even after being able to rest on the railcars for the last two days of their headlong trip from the Wild Lands. The troubadours were already fitting it into the songs.

  Shawonda groaned and made as if to rub herself rather indelicately. “Those Dúnedain are made of iron,” she said.

  “They’re very hardy warriors,” Yseult agreed; she didn’t add anything about their morals or, for most of them, their religion.

  “They’re cool,” Janie added. “I want to be one! Don’t you, Shawonda?”

  Shawonda looked a little troubled. “I’ve always loved the books, the Histories they call them. It was like being in the books to travel with the Dúnedain. But . . . and I don’t know if I want to be a soldier. It was wonderful what the Hiril Astrid did, but . . .”

  She shuddered. “The fight was so horrible. And I saw her die. It was awful, and she did it to save little Lawrence, or even Juliet, and it was so brave but . . . terrible.”

  Be fair about the Rangers, Yseult told herself. Some of them are good Catholics. Besides which, that was a glorious and knightly deed that Lady Astrid did, the rescue and the way she put herself in the way of the bolt. We all die soon or late, but Lady Astrid’s name will live while honor’s praise is sung, and God loves those who imitate Christ by sacrifice, even if they don’t know Him. I will pray for her; surely she’s in Purgatory.

  “Well, they’re not all knights-errant,” Yseult said aloud.

  She’d had a few romantic dreams about Mithrilwood herself; most girls did, for a little while at least, and some young noblemen. The old grudges had died away over her lifetime.

  “There aren’t any Ranger peasants,” she went on. “But they have . . . oh, troubadours, bards they call them, and armorers, and healers, and craftsfolk. And they own ranches, and hunt and do forestry, and have houses in towns, and things like that, so some of them look after their properties.”

  They came to the chambers that had been turned over to the Thurston family; the set above were for Juliet Thurston and her son. She’d noticed how strained relations still were between Mrs. Thurston and her daughter-in-law, largely smoothed over by the grandson. That this suite was theirs alone was a mark of favor given how crowded Castle Goldendale was, even if it did mean the two girls were sleeping on truckle beds in this sitting room.

  It was a pleasant enough chamber, shaped like a wedge of pie since it was in a circular tower, with plastered walls painted in hunting scenes. The location also made it easy to guard. There was no way in except through the outer gate, the keep gate, and then a guarded portal at the base. None of the windows were big enough for even a very small and lithe assassin to climb through.

  The staff had set out a cold collation for them; regular dining in Hall had gone by the board, with everything upset by the mobilization. She’d heard someone grumble that they were all grazing like a herd, wherever they found a moment.

  “Oh, good,” Shawonda said. “I’m starved, but in weather like this a regular cooked meal makes you feel so logy and stuffed afterwards.”

  Yseult flipped off the white linen cloth. “Let’s eat!” the sisters said in chorus, and took off the covers.

  There was sliced ham, roast quail, potatoes done with garlic and herbs, a salad of roasted peppers and sweet Walla Walla onions and cauliflower dressed with oil and vinegar, another of greenstuffs, along with good manchet bread and a big apricot tart with cream. The girls waited while she said grace, then ate with what she recognized as good manners of a very old-fashioned sort, and enthusiasm.

  Janie grinned and rubbed her hands after she’d loaded her plate. Yseult poured them all a glass of white wine. Janie paused and looked at hers a little dubiously.

  “Am I allowed to drink wine?” she said.

  “Well, some,” Yseult said, surprised again.

  Wine was what you drank with food, unless you had beer, which was slightly plebian. This wasn’t anything special, just ordinary drinkable wine decanted from a cask to a carafe and sent up from the kitchens.

  I knew they were from a different country, but it’s like they’re from a different time. I knew Boise clung to the old ways, but I didn’t expect so much.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because I’m sort of young?” Janie said.

  “You’re what . . . eleven?” Yseult said.

  “Since June.”

  “Well, I started drinking wine when I came out of the nursery . . . when I was six. Watered at first, of course. But don’t worry, I won’t let you get drunk!”

  Janie nodded a little dubiously, sipped, made an interested sound but switched to the cool water instead.

  “And it’s exciting to be in a real castle,” she said. “Pass the mustard, please . . . A castle with knights and everything! It looks just the way I imagined!”

  Shawonda nodded and jointed one of the little birds, a little more restrained as befitted a m
aiden in her mid-teens.

  “It’s really interesting. But I don’t want to have a banquet and everything all the time, not yet at least,” she said.

  Yseult blinked as she broke a piece of bread and buttered it.

  What’s odd or special about a castle? And castles are where knights live. Well, and manors. It’s no more strange than finding a horse in a stable or a monk in an abbey.

  “We don’t have banquets all the time,” she said instead. “Well, it’s a little different at Court, naturally they keep more state than anyone else and entertain more, and this is a royal castle. But normally we . . . ordinary Associate nobles and our retainers . . . just eat in Hall, you know.”

  “What’s that mean?” Janie asked.

  Yseult blinked again, forced to think how to explain something she’d taken for granted all her life.

  “Well, in Hall . . . you’ve seen the Hall here?”

  Shawonda nodded. “The great big building with the dais at one end and that marvelous huge fireplace and the stained-glass windows down one side and the tapestries? And the lovely coffered ceiling.”

  Janie nodded. “Yes, we saw that when we came here. Mathilda . . . I mean, the High Queen . . . met us and gave a sort of speech, and there were a lot of people. But wouldn’t that be for banquets? It’s awful big for just a dining room.”

  “You don’t have Halls?”

  “Not like that,” Shawonda said. “I mean, the capitol building in Boise has a big place where they have meetings, and sometimes special dinners. If you have dinner in a Hall, isn’t that a banquet?”

  “Well, no, it’s used for banquets too, but those are special occasions. Banquets are different, it’s mostly guests then, sometimes everyone’s a noble. But a Great Hall has to be big because all the Castle people eat there, except some of the extra troops if there’s a call-up, and it’s where you have dances and things, and music and performers and maybe mystery plays, and a lord may sit in judgment there for his manor court or the Court Baron, and you play games in winter or sew there at times in the summer if the solar gets too stuffy. A Hall will be a bit smaller in a manor house than a castle but it’s the same thing really.”

  “Everybody in a Castle or a manor eats in the hall?” Janie said.

  “Most days. The family and any noble guests at the head table, and then the Associate retainers, and then the commons down below the salt, from the highest-ranking servants down to the stable hands and that sort. We don’t all eat the same food, of course, or use the same tableware, but one reason common people want to serve in a castle is that they eat better than what they would get at home in their family’s cottage.”

  Shawonda returned to the subject. “So you eat in this Great Hall place every day?”

  “Not every day, especially not breakfast or luncheon, sometimes a lord will eat en famille with his wife and children or a few select guests in a solar or ladybower, but it’s . . . well, people will think you’re odd and, ummm, sort of . . . what was the old word . . . antisocial if you do that all the time. It’s good lordship to sit at meat with your folk. Though it’s nice to be private now and then, like this.”

  Shawonda looked down at her plate and realized it was empty except for a few clean-picked bones. Yseult thought she blushed, though it was a little difficult to tell for sure with the brown complexion.

  “Go ahead,” she laughed. “You’ve been on short rations, I know. Here, have some of the ham this time. The honey glaze is excellent.”

  “We were eating jerky and these hard biscuits and cheese and not much else while we rode so fast,” Janie said. “We were so tired we didn’t realize how hungry we were until we got to Ashland and we could sleep in a bed again!”

  Her sister nodded. “Everything sort of blurred together after the first couple of days. I think there were bandits once and I didn’t even notice because I was so tired and sore and half-asleep.”

  Silence fell for a few minutes; Yseult felt a bit amused at how the two made up for lost time, and restricted herself a little, passing over most of the red meat. Even if her time as an oblate was fading, it wasn’t quite over yet, and the Rule of the Sisters called for moderation. Yseult poured them all more wine, red this time, and sliced the tart and handed round the honeysweetened cream.

  “You’ve heard all about us, Lady Yseult,” Shawonda said.

  “Please, let’s be Yseult and Shawonda and Janie in private? You know, you’re actually princesses, so I should be the one who goes after. I’m just a baron’s daughter. Sister, now.”

  “We are?” Janie said. “Princesses? Really and truly?”

  Her sister looked at her. “Remember what Mathilda said back when they came to our place? I thought she was joking but now I think she really meant it. But don’t start calling yourself a princess, Janie. It might cause trouble, people at home wouldn’t like it.”

  She looked at Yseult. “But we don’t know what happened with you, just that the CUT . . . got at . . . your mother the way they did at . . . Martin. Would you tell us? It . . . it would make us feel less alone.”

  “Like we’re part of an army, not just people something bad happened to,” Janie said.

  She’s no fool. Neither of them are, Yseult thought as she sipped her wine. Maybe I should. We do have this in common. And . . . not to be cynical, but they are princesses. I like them, and it certainly can’t hurt to be friends. You need friends in this world. Friends, and strong allies. And you can’t have friends unless you’re prepared to be one yourself.

  “Well, my mother was arrested, when the Lady Regent found out what she’d done,” Yseult began slowly. “Everyone suspected Huon and me, too.”

  “That must have been awful,” Shawonda said

  “Were you locked up in a dungeon?” Janie said, with the ghoulishness of her age.

  “Not quite! What happened was—”

  CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE

  WILLAMETTE VALLEY NEAR NEWBURG

  (FORMERLY WESTERN OREGON)

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  SEPTEMBER 27, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD

  Her quarters at Todenangst were not quite a cell. There was a room that was small and whitewashed within and furnished with a plain bed with equally plain but adequate sheets and blankets, a small cupboard and a commode. There was a Spartan sitting room next to it, with a table and chairs and an étagère. The place smelled of soap and wax and, very slightly, of concrete still curing after all these years; a maid came through and cleaned thoroughly every day.

  There was no need for her do to anything menial, no dérogeance, but it was very bleak.

  She rose each morning when the sun came through the high slit windows, dressed in her riding habit, waited for the door to open and was escorted by an unspeaking squire with an equally taciturn middle-aged duenna to the stables and rode for two hours, in a walled tilt-yard of the Protector’s Guard, under instruction and ward of the Master of the Stables, Sir Henri Gallardo.

  Castle Todenangst was more than a castle; you could have lost Castle Gervais in it a dozen times over. It was a palace and a city in itself, the inner keep here alone a vast labyrinthine complex of towers and courtyards, little hidden gardens and terraces, armories and barracks, offices and halls and galleries, archives and libraries and chapels and quirking passageways. Some of it was bleakly plain like her rooms; some parts she traversed were stunningly beautiful and decorated with things new-made by the Protectorate’s most skilled artists or plundered from half a continent. All of it had a faint air of menace that might be her imagination. After days she still felt she’d be hopelessly lost if she took one wrong turn, and almost grateful for the constant escort.

  Sometimes late at night she thought of its building, twenty thousand men laboring through five years of hunger and brutal toil just for the main framework, some leaving their bones in its mass concrete bulk and most in the nearby graves. From the bed, if she stood, she could see the Black Tower glittering with the crystal inclusions i
n its dark granite sheathing. That had been the Lord Protector’s lair, and of him men still spoke with awe and dreadful fear.

  After riding she went to confession—brief ones, where every day was the same—and Mass in an astonishing Lady Chapel that was like being inside a jewel, sitting between her guards of the day. Then the guards escorted her to the sitting room and a late breakfast, plain but adequate. After that she was free until her lessons and the escort to the baths where she was always the only occupant.

  Free, she thought as she paced, after a time that seemed to stretch out forever and flick by in instants, both at the same time.

  Free to do absolutely anything I can do in these two rooms! Free to pound my head on the walls!

  Her books, brought from Gervais, she placed beside her bed; she arranged a little prie-dieu in her sitting room and spent hours trying to pray. A lute was brought at her request, and she was allowed to borrow, through Virgilia, any book she wanted out of the Todenangst libraries. That was one good thing, because they seemed to have all the books in the world. Virgilia gave her lessons from three to seven. The very first day the older woman told her bluntly that there were eavesdroppers, and her skin crawled at the thought that eyes might be on her at any moment of the day or night, and how the whole castle might be honeycombed by secret passages. The Spider had designed it, after all.

  After that she kept her mind strictly on her lessons when Virgilia was there.

  Each day she came back to the bare little room and tried to focus on a short list of tasks. She worked at making the hours pass by assigning to each one a different task. For the most part, she paced; unable to focus on any one task as raw worry gnawed at her balance.

  Odard, she thought. Where is he now, out in the barbarian lands? Huon . . . is he still a page at Mollala? Mother . . . Fen House . . . people whisper about it. Better than the dungeons, but . . . and will I ever leave here? What happens if I start to scream at the walls?

  She paced four quick steps one way and the seven at right angles, over and over as noon crept to one and Virgilia arrived to distract her. The fourth day as she sat and picked up a new piece of embroidery she’d started in hopes of focusing her attention once again, the door opened and Huon walked in.